Empaths: Balancing the Desire of Wanting to be Wanted

Asking us Empaths what we want tends to be a long conversation for our intimate partner (just saying!). While all people succumb to the complexities of desire, us Empaths tend to be even more conflicted as our desires can easily become focused on our partner’s wants and not our own.

Now, before confusion sets in, remember, that Empaths can literally feel the emotions of others. In an act as intimate as sex, I am flooded with the passionate desires of my lover that is very intoxicating! Separating our emotions from the one closest to us while we are nakedly embraced in physical passion is perhaps one of the hardest things to do in the world!

However, this can easily be a temptation trap where our passion of desire circulates not on true intimacy, but of wanting to be wanted.

Assuming you are a female Empath, we also have another hurdle in regards to sexual passions as often we question whether we should break the rules and boundaries that have been set for us over the confines of male standards and desires. When we are wanted by our partner, the feeling of his desire coupled with making him feel very very good during the act of sex can be addicting! However, this thought process limits us from being aware of our actual desires and prevents us from living by our own intentions.

Before I met my husband, I had never openly discussed my likes or dislikes in the bedroom. I liked when a man took charge as it made me feel unladylike to be any different. Besides, I was more interested in making sure he was having the time of his life as I could feel what he was feeling even more intensely when he was inside me…but that was not enough to make me orgasm, but I didn’t care, because it was more about the fleeting passion of wanting to be wanted.

Polly Young-Eisendrath states in Women and Desire: Beyond Wanting to Be Wanted, “Wanting to be wanted is not codependency. It’s not something that develops out of someone else’s needs or demands. Rather, it is a desire for power and control that has been transformed and hidden. Instead of learning how to fulfill this –our own–desire, we learn gradually, but clearly, how to fulfill others’.”

I remember reading this book with tears welling up in my eyes – Polly spoke a deep truth that I had to face.

She continues, “The dynamic is rooted in the widespread psychological and social constraints of female power. For, in spite of feminism, female power –decisiveness, status, command, influence–cannot be expressed directly at home or in the workplace without arousing suspicion, confusion, fear, or dread. Both women and men still tend to experience female power as exotic at best and dangerous and despicable at worst. Lacking clear avenues for developing our power directly, we learn to be indirect in making emotional arrangements based on others’ need and wants, and how we would like to be seen.”

Luckily, God gave me a husband that loved me enough to give me what was needed and not per say what I wanted: he wanted me to experience true physical and emotional intimacy. Well, pleasing me physically was not what pleased me emotionally: I just wanted him to ravage me!

I remember getting entirely frustrated with my husband who was not giving me my way by just being the selfish one in he sack! He wanted to know what I liked. I just felt utterly like a “bad girl” to even suggest my deepest desires to him, and really was fine so long as he was the one sweeping me of my feet. In truth, I had no idea what I liked or didn’t like – I was used to always enjoying the act based on how my partner was feeling.

The truth was I harbored a deep fear of opening myself up to that kind of vulnerability. Once someone knows you on that level, it is an exposure that can be overwhelming. It was much easier just feeling his emotions throughout the process in exchange for not being vulnerable. It is totally more socially acceptable for guys to be aggressive and domineering during sex — but it just wasn’t the same for a girl! I didn’t know how to tell him what I liked or didn’t like without what I felt ruining the moment. I didn’t know how to take charge and didn’t have the confidence because I really had never had this happen!

It took me a long time to realize that I was in the wrong. I remember getting so angry at my husband for not romancing me in the superficial sense that I felt most comfortable with that it lead me to say mean words. I was always very sexually appealing to others, and just didn’t understand why he could not just do I as I wanted…but that is the thing with a soulmate twin flame: they don’t give you what you want…they give you what you need.

Society puts a lot of pressure on females and their views towards sex – it can become the taboo. My husband was not falling for my little nighties and the plethora of other materialistic antics I pulled to try to manipulate him into romancing me in an utter passion of desire. I was getting super frustrated as I felt helpless in this regards as there was no way to manipulate the situation (I know – it was horrible of me!). But, it really felt like a part of me was dying and that I wasn’t physically attractive anymore!

But what I see today is that my husband wanted me to experience physical pleasure – that made him happy. I wanted him to experience the same, but was trying to fake my way through to avoid the feeling of vulnerability and guilt when sex was more about me! A guy reaching climax is way more systematic usually than a female! I felt so much pressure when I had to physically orgasm that I would get anxious and it was just a mental mess!

Even to this day, I still remember the awful feelings of feeling unwanted by my husband, even though that was not what he was doing at all…in fact, he was doing just the opposite, but at the time, it did not feel that way.

I can’t speak for other Empath’s, but the entire process of intimacy in general was hard for me to open up to. Sometimes, the desire of wanting to be wanted can cloud us from feeling and knowing who we are. That is when the empathetic energy takes a turn for the negative spectrum.

I often blog about Narcissist’s as their energy is one that I have been called to show compassion and love for. For Empaths that have a similar calling, this is one of the only relations I can empathize with from personal understanding in the terms of narcissistic supply albeit in an indirect way. While Narcissist’s mirror the Empath’s hidden desires with the intent to ensnare and devalue them after the golden period, my intent was never to do such a thing, but I still was addicted to that primordial feeling of raw desire when I closed myself off emotionally during sex to fulfill the desire of another through their feelings.

True intimacy is amazing, but it requires knowledge of oneself and acceptance of another…and trust.

I hope after reading this post, other Empaths may be able to relate and understand that it is super important to be able to free ourselves from the desire of wanting to be wanted to create true intimacy with our partner. That is true love and a gift too good to pass up.

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3 comments

Can a man be a sexual dominant and empath? I’m asking because I’m in the mix of sorting out what I was involved in. Also, would a true empath tell another person, they’re in fact an empath?
Preface: I’m trying to figure out if I was doped by a covert narcissist. Thank you so much for any input

So sorry it took me so long to respond! Typically, most empath’s respond sexually to the needs of their significant other and ‘tune in’ to their feelings of desire, even if they do not have the feelings themselves! If a man is a sexual dominant and was doing this on behalf of his own self, he is not typically what we refer to as empathic. As far as a true empath telling someone their another empath, I would say a true empath would certainly hold the opinion to make that call, but not all empaths are alike. A covert narcissist is typically associated with feelings of neglect, anxiety, and hypersensitivity – these qualities can attract empaths who are in tune to these feelings of inadequacy to try to ‘heal them’ – however, if the narcissism is too prevalent, the empath will run dry and often in a backwards, unhealthy way, the narcissist will break things off before depletion is imminent.